I can't afford it but I can dream:

[sylvar]

<td>1</td> <td>Network card</td> <td align="right">20.00</td> <td align="right">20.00</td>

A JBOD Server

Qty	Item	Unit Price	Extended Price
1	Full tower case	150.00	150.00
1	Athlon XP 2x00 and motherboard	150.00	150.00
1	512MB memory stick	40.00	40.00
1	Dual Channel ATA133 controller	25.00	25.00
8	160GB hard drives (total 1.28TB)	130.00	1040.00
TOTAL:			1425.00

Sure, I coulda stuck more hardware in there, but I'm a pragmatic dreamer. By the time I need larger disks, they'll be cheaper.

Comments

[ximinez]

Do you really need 1.28TB of disk space? (Of course, we all want 1.28TB of disk space, but that's not what I'm asking.)

Drop the number of drives down to 2, double the RAM (duh), and your total comes out to only $685. Much more reasonable.

And you can always add more hard drives later. ;)

You're mean.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

$685 is much more reasonable. (At that, I could just buy the ATA133 card and one extra drive and still be happy for now, but dammit, I want to reduce my debt. The fact that I could have somewhere over 200GB on my machine for less than $200 is just too damn tempting.

Plus, I'm guessing that Win98 might not know what to do with a drive that large. But maybe that's the controller's lookout...

*sigh* WAY too tempting.

Re: You're mean.

[ximinez]

a) I know how you feel. We're trying to get out of debt, too.

b) Win98? Augh. Give it a small partition and use the rest of the drive(s) for a real OS!

c)

[eah@maharet]$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5            105748256  49371592  51004932  50% /
/dev/hda1               101089     26999     68871  29% /boot
/dev/hda2              8096976    546432   7550544   7% /windows

That's a 120GB drive, including 27GB of "media", a RedHat 8.0 "everything" install, 1.5GB of swap, and a nearly-full backup of the drive that I upgraded from.

My point is that if you really do have the upgrade bug, You may not even need to go to a full 200GB. And if you're thinking of upgrading just because it's cheap, think back to every "but honey, it was on sale" joke you've ever heard, and reconsider a bit. ;)

Re: You're mean.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

1. $2300 to go. I've already paid off the high-interest stuff (Sears, car repair) and I've only got like $60 on Syms.


2. Jodi hates Linux and Dvorak; I hate maintaining two systems on a dialup, swapping physical keyboards and arguing. Besides, SuSE's support for dialup sucks.


3. I'm burning my entire CD collection to 192k mp3. 60GB isn't enough, and it doesn't make sense to buy any less than 120GB right now.

I don't know any "but honey, it was on sale" jokes.

Re: You're mean.

[ximinez]

a) Nice.

b) Wait a second, what exactly are you doing here? You're describing an entirely new system. That doesn't mean you have to retire your existing one. Put Win98 on it, and that'll be Jodi's. For the new one, buy two network cards, put SuSE (or another *nix OS with better dial-up support) on it, and configure it to autodial and route. It's not as hard as it sounds.

c) How many CDs do you have? My collection (admittedly ripped at probably 128k), mixed mp3 and ogg is about 500 (legit) CDs (according to "find ~/media/music/ -type d | wc"), and takes about 15-20Gb.

Don't misunderstand me. If you need the space, you need the space, but do you need the space?

Re: You're mean.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

It must be the bitrate.

Re: You're mean.

[ximinez]

Actually, I think my number of albums estimate was off.

find media/music/ -type f|wc

tells me I have 4488 files.

The bitrate should only account for a factor of 192/128 (1.5x). You must just have a lot more CDs than I do. Either that or ogg really does save a lot of space...

[foozini.livejournal.com]

Have you thought of putting in a 3ware IDE RAID card in this? If you are going to be putting so many IDE drives into a system, you may want to protect them a bit. 3ware makes some IDE RAID cards that will handle 8 or even 12 drives at a time.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

If I find a reason to do this at work, yeah.